Or so you might be tempted to believe, given how people (and mostly these people are, in my experience, men) do bang on about it. Everybody who makes chili seems to have an opinion, everybody’s recipe is different, and people can get downright snotty on whether or it’s real chili if you use beans. Apparently vegetarians are banned entirely from being taken seriously as chili cooks by that standard.

My opinion is you are probably right, and I am making it all wrong, but I get no complaints, so I’m going to carry on doing as I please, as should you. And what I please changes with every single pot I make, and I have made many of them. Chili is more of a concept to me than an engraved-in-stone recipe, which is why I’m not going to give a specific recipe in this post. There are some things that never change with mine; plenty of garlic, onions and green peppers. Both fresh chilis and chili powder. There will be cumin, and probably plenty of it. I always garnish it generously, and I like it thick, with the tomatoes well-reduced. Oh, and there will always be tomatoes in it, somewhere, even if it’s only the garnish on a white chili, which is another controversial topic amongst purists.

When I can get them, either by growing them myself, or lucking into a deli that sells them in tins, I like using tomatillos and chicken in my white chili, although I’m occasionally willing to buy into the pork industry’s The Other White Meat marketing, if I’m in the mood. I also think you could make a pretty nifty version with white fish, and I think I will try that one of these days, as I have overcome my fear of cooking fish in the last year or so.

So what I’m basically saying here is I haven’t more than glanced at a chili recipe in years, much less followed one to the letter. My recently-acquired passion for what I suppose is best described as Mahgrebi and Mashriqi cuisines has led to some damn fine, if somewhat unorthodox chilis, as well as many happy and educational hours reading cookbooks and falling down internet rabbit holes.

And all this, from a woman who made her first pot of chili by following the recipe on the back of the McCormick’s packet approximately 30 years ago. It was pretty good, as I recall, and I don’t have the heart or arrogance to look down on salt-heavy, pre-mixed spice packets. Those things started me down the road, way back when.

It doesn’t matter, though; even if you’re an unswerving pre-mixed spice packet user, your chili is the best, because everybody’s is the best.

But back to my chili. I realised this weekend that it had been, for me, absolute ages since I’d made chili. So when I went to my awesome butcher to buy the meat for the weekend’s cooking, I got a goodly amount of their rare breed pastured minced beef (and oh god, is it good to fearlessly buy minced meat and not worry about it crawling with god knows what filth, and oh god, I’d forgot just how good beef is supposed to taste, and oh godx3, it really doesn’t cost all that much more than the [too-often literally] shitty supermarket beef, and it’s not pumped full of water, either, but this digression is getting out of hand) and brought it home, resolved to end this chili drought, which I did on Sunday, for dinner with Phil and his dad.

One recent innovation, courtesy of Spain (Olé!), is an outright obsession with smoked pimentón, which is one spice I’d managed to miss for most of my chili-making career, probably because I thought paprika was boring as hell, based on the probably well-out-of-date sweet paprika my mom tended to sprinkle on cottage cheese, when she was feeling fancy. I WAS SO WRONG. I also thought I didn’t like sweet red peppers, but it turns out, I only didn’t like their bitter, nasty skins, so it’s good to know I can still acquire new tastes in my oncoming dotage. (I learned to blister the hell out of them in the oven and slip their skins off, and hello, ambrosial red peppers, you are now on my short list of favourite foods in the world. Just hitting them with a fruit peeler works as well, if you don’t want them roasted.

So I whacked a bunch of that into it, and unless I am making white chili, in which case I’ll probably sprinkle a little of it on top as part of my elaborate garnish technique, picanté pimentón is joining the roster of permanent chili ingredients. Another new innovation: barring an emergency, in which case I’d just use tinned anyway, as god is my witness, I will never cook dried beans in anything other than my slow-cooker ever again, amen. (Exception: that toxin-killing ten minute hard boil needed for kidney/cannellini beans.) I much prefer cooking with dried beans, and being able to soak them all day, cook them on low overnight, and then use them the following day has totally been a game-changer for me. Why did I spend so long thinking that couldn’t possibly work, and using my super-scary (although perfectly safe) pressure cooker? I’ll tell you why, it’s because up until Nigella Lawson, bless her, offered up this technique in her most recent book, a pressure cooker was the only way I could manage to successfully cook dried beans. I don’t know why the hell I had some kind of terrible cook-it-on-the-hob luck, but I did, and my beans always had horrible hard, crunchy skins on them after like HOURS of simmering, until I tried the pressure cooker. Which is swell, and I’ll probably use it again, if I’m pressed for time, even if it screams terrifyingly, but it’s the crock pot for me from here on in, whenever possible.

So this is getting ridiculously long, so to come back to my original point, chili is awesome, and I am seldom happier in the kitchen than when I am making it. And then we get to eat it, and, as it turns out, my dining companions inform me that I, in fact, make the best chili in the world.

A happy woman, with unfortunate hair, making chili for the people she loves.

It’s Wednesday, which means, in the normal course of things, Phil will be home tomorrow evening, and I will be feeding two (and, on Friday and Sunday, three) people, for dinner. I am not a big eater of breakfast and lunch; I’m much more prone to snacking lightly early in the day, and then eating my main meal at dinner, but Phil likes his three squares, and while I tend to cook the main dish of the evening meal on the day itself, I like to have my sides, and Phil’s lunches, already made up, so all I have to do is reheat and put it in front of him. So Wednesdays are devoted, in large part, to shopping and cooking.

Breakfasts are easy; I make up a big vat of pinhead oatmeal, which I stash in a large yogurt or peanut butter bucket in the fridge, and then reheat in the mornings. Given that it takes forever to make the steel-cut stuff, I toss two cups of it in a large saucepan, add about 4 cups of water, and cook it until the water is mostly absorbed. Then I take it off the heat, put a lid on it, and let it sit overnight on the cold hob, and refrigerate first thing in the morning. It’s a matter of scooping some out into a bowl, adding water and a splash of milk, and giving it a few minutes in the microwave after that. My attitude to steel-cut oats is much the same as how I feel about bone stock; I think it’s objectively better tasting, probably better for you, but there’s nothing particularly magical or virtuous about it. If pressed for time, or out of stock, I’ll happily use rolled oats (or liquid stock concentrate, for that matter) and think it’s close enough to ideal to not be bothered by it. I’ve only been able to find the barely-processed stuff in one health food store, and I do sometimes use it up before I get a chance to replenish.

Instant, or what they call “porridge oats,” over here, however, is completely out of the question. It’s like paste, it is horrible, and I am pretty sure most of the benefits of eating whole grains are lost in the hideous slurry you get when you cook it up. Avoid!

So, before I go out vegetable shopping, I’m cooking up some lentils, because the vast majority of cook-ahead stuff I stash in the fridge for the weekend are curries, and I always like to have a dal as one of them. First off, I LOVE the stuff. Let’s just get that out of the way straight off; there is a fair amount of self-interest there. Secondly, Phil loves it too, and research seems to indicate pulses are some of the best carbs you can eat, if you’re looking to control blood sugar, which we are. (Much the same with oatmeal.) Carbs are not the devil around here, in spite of the currently well-controlled diabetic I am feeding, but for the most part, we like them to be extremely complex carbs, full of character; i.e., I am not baking cookies and making trifle very often. I am cautiously adding a bit of wholegrain bread back into the carb budget, because I have this awesome new oven, and I love baking bread. (And also eating it, of course.)

Today’s dal is going to be pretty basic, as I’m still not back into the swing of my usual routine, and I am going with what has consistently worked well. Thus:

Ana’s Basic Tadka-ish Dal:

Step 1:

300-ish grams of split red lentils

2 dried chili peppers

2 fat cloves of garlic

1 teaspoon turmeric

Pick over, and then rinse the lentils thoroughly. Put in a good-sized saucepan, and cover with water. Add chilis, garlic, and turmeric, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, turn the flame (I have a gas hob) down to low, and partially cover. Cook until lentils have basically dissolved into a grainy-looking mush. Remove from burner and allow to cool for 10-15 minutes, then fish out the chilis and discard. I generally purée the lentils and garlic cloves with a stick blender, because I like a smooth dal, but it isn’t strictly necessary if you like it somewhat more rustic. Just give the lentils and garlic cloves, which will be plenty soft, a good mashing, in that case.

Step 2, the tadka:

Ghee, or other fat with a high smoke point

A pinch of hing (also known as asafoetida)

About a tablespoon of whole spices, I generally favour black mustard, cumin, and nigella seeds, or if I’m feeling really lazy, just some pre-mixed panch phoron.

1 large onion, finely sliced into half-moons.

3-5 thin green chilis, slit along one side

3-5 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced, depending on how big they are

1 dried chili pepper

1 tablespoon ground coriander

2 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground fenugreek

small handful of dried curry leaves, crushed

juice of 1/2 lemon

a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh coriander

Heat the ghee or other fat in a heavy-bottomed pan on a medium flame. When it’s good and hot, throw in the seeds and the dried chili. When they begin to pop, put in the hing, and give it all a good stir. Add the onions, and cook for a few minutes, until they begin to soften. Now is the time to add the garlic, green chilis, and all of the spices, except for the curry leaves. If it starts to stick, add a small amount of water, and keep stirring. Once the onions have gone limp and brown, and the chilis and garlic have softened, put in the curry leaves and let them crumble down a bit more, and get slicked with the ghee and spices.

Dump it all into the lentils, and stir it all up! If you’re planning on eating it soon, put the lentils back over a moderate flame, and heat it all up. Add water, if it’s gone thicker than you’d like, and before serving, add the lemon juice and sprinkle with the fresh coriander. It usually goes straight into a container and into the fridge for me, at this point, and by leaving the whole chilis in it it gets quite a bit spicier as it rests until we’re ready to eat it. Given that this makes quite a lot of dal, I usually get a few portions out of it for both of us, depending on what it’s being served with. I just pull it out and reheat by the serving, adding water as needed, because it thickens quite a lot upon standing.

And now I’m off, to get some labneh straining, and soak some black-eyed beans! Wednesday is well underway.

So we ended up having an unexpected guest last night; Phil texted his dad at midnight, to say happy new year, and invited him to drop in when he got back from his evening with Phil’s cousin’s family. He came in and had a drink and a chat with us, ’round the dining room table, then eventually pushed off and I went to bed. Phil obviously stayed up for a couple more hours, so come morning, I was up early, and he still slumbers on.

To keep myself occupied, and because we have his dad coming back tonight for our usual Friday dinner, I started mooching through the leftovers, looking for ways to give them new life. I had a bunch of filo scraps, many lemons, so many eggs, and as it happens, horrifying amounts of caster sugar, and a big pot of Fage Greek yogurt in the fridge, along with a vague memory from my baklava research, of something called patsavoura glyko, a sweet yogurt pie made with jumbled-up filo scraps. No delicate handling needed, just bunch ’em up in the bottom of a lightly greased pan, mix up the yogurt with oil, sugar, eggs, a bit of baking powder, and some vanilla extract (although I added some lemon zest, ‘cuz I think lemon zest improves practically any creamy sweet thing), which you then pour over the filo, and bake at about 200° C for 30-ish minutes or so. Then you let it cool, and pour over a hot lemon syrup, and voilà, you got your patsavoura glyko. Because I cannot leave well enough alone, or, seemingly, follow a recipe precisely, I cut the recipe roughly in half, as I’m only feeding three people, and there was the lemon zest, and there might possibly be some rosewater in the syrup, because I love rosewater.

It’s cooling now, and I am soon to take a break from writing to make the syrup. At the moment, however, I have some oxtails roasting in the oven, as a preliminary to making a good, hearty, beef stock. When I first moved over here, the BSE-era rules about beef on the bone were still strictly enforced, and this made it hard to make a really good stock. Happily, the ban ended some time back, but finding good soup bones can still be a challenge, and I was resigned to commercial beef stock (the liquid Touch of Taste concentrate is actually pretty good) until one day, in Sainsbury’s, I spotted some oxtails. Hello! I thought. Beef bones, and in a nice, compact form. I had absolutely no experience with oxtail, but figured they’d work, and so they did. You want an intensely flavoursome jellied beef stock, which freezes beautifully? Oxtail. Very strong, so it has to be cut with water, but it’s nice to have so much flavour for such a small commitment of freezer space, always at a premium around here.

So, to get rid of my stock of wilting herbs, some sad-looking celery, and a few flabby carrots (all still perfectly fine and safely edible, just nothing you’d want to bite into raw), I grabbed a package of oxtails when I saw them in the shop. I’ll pull them out of the oven, chuck them in one of my slow cookers (I, uh, have three of them, and I’d probably buy a mini if I could find one) with the veg and herbs, cover it all with water, and then ignore it for 12 hours or so, which is when the unpleasant part comes, and I have to strain it. Gack. Worth it, but I do dread that part.

There appears to be some kind of paleo/autoimmune cult around bone stock these days, and, well, I doubt it’s quite the miracle devotées of said cult believe, but it’s good stuff, and if people who invest it with magical properties create enough of a demand for it that I can find oxtails easily, without having to go to the inconveniently-located butcher, great! Unfortunately, this also drives prices up — see what happened to lamb shanks for an example — but every time I see a £3 whole chicken in the shops, I feel kind of sad and horrible, as I wonder what kind of conditions those chickens, and the people who raise and process them, must live and work in. Organic/free-range seem more realistically priced, but harder to find. Still, if your food budget is severely limited, there’s a couple of meals to be got from a chicken…and then I remind myself that I am being one of those middle-class people, the kind who is one patronising step away from telling economically disadvantaged people all of the time-consuming and skill-heavy ways they could be feeding themselves cheaper and more healthily, and I want to smack myself.

Right. So that bit up there was such a downer that I wandered off to make my rosewater/lemon syrup, which I duly soaked my cake with, and the cake tastes great, although it’s far from photogenic. You know what is photogenic? This:

I found Yorkshire pudding more intimidating than baklava. I don’t cook much plain English, and it would be just like me to fall on my ass with something so simple. Fortunately, it was great!

I made toad-in-the-hole for tea, as I think my father-in-law had kind of hit the wall with all the spicy stuff I’ve been cooking of late, and on a wretchedly cold and rainy night, stodge with onion gravy goes down a treat. I used some of my leftover onion confit as a base for the gravy, and got another couple of hundred grams of flour and 4 eggs out of my overstock — I made far too much batter, but it’ll keep well enough, so I’ll make something else of it tomorrow. Possibly some sort of clafoutis, depending on what kind of fruit I can scrounge up. I swear I am totally going off desserts as a regular thing, once Phil goes back to work, because god knows the extra kilo of holiday lard needs to be driven off as soon as possible, but in the meantime, the ugly Greek yogurt and filo cake tasted much better than it looked.

I keep waking up in the night, worrying about how I’m going to get everything done, and what I have to cook or bake or buy today. Then I remind myself it’s OK, I have no more to do for Boxing Day, and now all I have to do is repurpose leftovers. And that’s going pretty well! Plenty went straight into the freezer, and can just be thawed and heated up at a later date, and I’ve made two batches of soup so far, some of which went to feed us, some went to my father-in-law, and the rest will be eaten, or remade into something else, and frozen. It’ll be OK! I’m basically done! But my nervous system hasn’t quite got the message yet.

Back to the food on the day, though. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I had a roomful of people wanting to eat, Phil didn’t get a chance to take photos of the albóndigas or the chorizo a la sidra, but meatballs and sausages aren’t terribly photogenic anyway, and trust me, they were delicious. The sausage I bought from Lunya was perfection, and many thanks to Lunya’s chef, who came out of the kitchen, carrying sausages from his own stock, when the shop assistant kindly went back to find out which of their (many, many) sorts of chorizo I should use, in response to my query, insisting I must use these sausages, these were the sort they used, and unsurprisingly he was right, as they were fantastic. (Basically, you need to go with an uncured sausage, and they had only cured in the deli’s chiller case.) I can’t say enough nice things about Lunya. I’ve been going in there for years, and have never found the staff anything less than helpful and friendly and totally knowledgable about their wares.

And there’s the muhumarra! This turned out to be my favourite thing, and it was totally last minute; I had some uneaten roasted red peppers, a lot of leftover walnuts, and a few bits of stale bread to use up, and thus, gorgeous, lovely, muhumarra.

All as seen previously, but perhaps a little more clearly here. The spanakopita disappeared in the first round of feasting, and the sausage rolls weren’t far behind. I kicked some butt with those, I did. (Plenty stashed in the freezer, but people were losing steam at that point, so I didn’t bake more.)

Muhummara, oh I am so pleased with that stuff. And so pleased I have the leftovers all to myself. Yum!mezze corner! olives, nibbly things, guacamole, hummus, muhammara, Greek salad (that was amazing; I’d been tenderly ripening those tomatoes for days, glimpses of spanakopita and mediterranean herbed steamed potatoes

And there it is, my culinary meisterwerk. No, not, strictly speaking, a purely tapas spread, as Spain was far from the only country represented, but we most definitely did not have the traditional British or American holiday spread. To me, the spirit of tapas and mezze and the groaning board in general is pretty universal; come, eat, be sociable, and happy. Yes, I totally overdid it, but what the hell: it was good.

Well, aside from some shopping and planning and general freaking out, I didn’t actually get stuck in and start cooking until last night. I made two jars of chutney for the tapas buffet (apple, mango) and I’m hoping to get some tomato chutney and onion confit done tonight. I’m also aiming to get the tomato sauce for my albóndigas done and in the freezer, although that may wait until tomorrow, as it can simmer away happily enough while I’m shovelling out Phil’s man cave. I want to get a batch of savoury/spicy cooking out of the way before I start the cookie and bread dough, to avoid contaminating my sugar cookies with pimentón. I may be contemplating putting some orange blossom and rosewater in my shortbread, but pimentón is a bit too avant garde for me. (Look at me gettin’ all fancy with the italics and accents there!)

Clementines mean Christmas! And this shot means Phil has a new flash to play with. Also, it had been a long, gale-filled day.

I came down with a case of botulism paranoia, and instead of just doing what I used to do when making jam and chutney-ish stuff, and putting blazing hot food into oven-sterilised jars, then sealing immediately, I bought a preserving rack and some lifting tongs, and water bath sterilised everything. This is how we canned (jarred?) stewed tomatoes when I was growing up, so I knew how to do it, but up until now, I’ve never felt the need, because I generally stick with jams, confits, and chutneys, and frankly, I’ve never read a British recipe for any of those things that called for the water bath. Instead, you get a much more laid-back “eh, sterilise the jars and seals, and don’t touch the insides when you’re potting up.” And I think they are probably right, and I’ve never had a poisoned or spoilt jar yet, but Google and the various USDA sources that land high on its searches feel VERY VERY STRONGLY that using anything but a water bath to preserve will kill you deader than hell.

Not-so-artistically-arranged, but still: clementines!

And I’d roll my eyes, and do it the way I always have, because I am a rebel, but I’m also feeding 20 other people who might not share my cavalier attitude, including elderly people in uncertain health, and youngish children, so a water bath it had to be. (And I’m probably going to store it in the fridge as well, because thanks for the paranoia, USDA.) It was a pain in the arse, but I did find the sound of the seals popping into place strangely satisfying.

And just this morning, the lowest string of lights burned out. Good thing we got a photo first!

Oh god, I have so much to do. I hypothetically love this sort of thing, and I love the feeling of satisfaction that I get after it’s all done, and I’m slumped in a chair, with only my husband and cat to witness my exhaustion and oh thank god it’s over exhilaration, and there are no more guests and only a pile of leftovers to feed us over the next few days, but actually getting there, well, it’s complicated.

(Written and wandered away from on 8 December. I want this published, so I can remind myself of what this all takes, if I’m ever tempted to do this again.)